From Peter Musgrave Most of us hadn’t seen Ken for many years, yet his image and personality remain more vividly in the mind than colleagues’ still active today. I first met him around 1954, when an assistant on a Group 3 feature dubbing at Beaconsfield Studios. Anvil Films was newly formed from the ashes of the Crown Film Unit (they even adapted the old logo), and needed an editor for their first documentary contracts. Ken offered the job to me - I was so inexperienced that I was amazed, but he coaxed me into it. Economy reigned: no assistant, and an unheated cutting room, but I learned fast, including that underneath Ken’s sometimes testy exterior was a kindly, vastly knowledgeable man who disliked waste and pomposity. His dual-purpose theatre was cramped during the bigger music sessions, but Ken was in his element and greatly valued by composers, for whom he’d pour huge scotches at sundown. In 1974 he wrote an article for the GBFE Journal (and ticked me off for changing a semicolon) which jovially ridiculed the rapidly increasing technology ‘needed’ to record music; it still reads amusingly. On click tracks: “What are we coming to if a composer, conducting his own music to a score which he has timed, does not know when the first beat of each bar must come? They are not composers, they are glorified fruit machines.” On mixing desks: “Dozens of knobs and switches, most of which never seem to be touched. . . dominate a control room which is vast only because it has to accommodate them all together with the Producer, Director, Editor, their wives and children on holiday, their assistants, their dogs, their chauffeurs. . . and people who have come in out of the rain.” He disliked ACT (today’s BECTU). When they put pressure on him to decide if he was a boss OR a technician, he made them advertise his own job in such a way that only he fitted the description! | From John Aldred Ken Cameron was the brother of the late James Cameron, the well known writer and broadcaster. I first met Ken at Pinewood Studios in 1942, where he was Sound Supervisor of the newly created Crown Film Unit. Although I was in the Army Film Unit, our paths were continually crossing and since we both used the same dubbing theatre I was often ‘on loan’ to Ken. He once told me that he started his career as an electrical engineer in the Glasgow Tramways Dept, but transferred to the Post Office Film Unit, which became the Crown Film Unit upon the outbreak of war. Ken’s one passion was for music, and he would choose either Watford or Wembley Town Hall as a music studio, usually arriving before everybody else and wearing a kilt. He was delighted when I built him a monitor amplifier for his music sessions at a time when that kind of equipment was unavailable. I can see him now, sitting at his four way RCA dubbing mixer, working on many of the Crown documentaries such as Fires Were Started, Listen to Britain and Western Approaches. Ken liked ‘a wee dram’ from time to time, and would often retire to his office - especially after a row. He did not suffer fools gladly, even if they were producers. At the end of the war, when the Crown Film Unit was disbanded, he formed Anvil Films at Beaconsfield Studios and offered me a job, so I bought a house at High Wycombe to be near the studios. However, I eventually went to work at the new MGM Studios in Boreham Wood, and felt dreadful at letting Ken down, but we remained good friends and met up once in a while. Ken was extremely generous by nature and, wearing his kilt, hosted the legendary Anvil Christmas parties on the music stage at the former Denham Film Studios, whither the company had moved in its next phase. I last saw Ken just before I retired to Spain when he took me to lunch - at a Spanish restaurant. Sadly, we shall not see the likes of him again. |
